Multi-Organizational UC

Insight & Analysis

The UCStrategies Experts share their expertise in bylined articles, opinion pieces, blogs, and podcasts, to define unified communications, educate you about unified communications technologies, and help you make informed decisions about unified communications solutions.

Resources

UCStrategies.com defines unified communications as “Communications integrated to optimize business processes.” The definition of unified communications narrows significantly when you can read and hear about real-world examples that other companies are implementing right now—and apply them to your situation.

This section offers learning tools to help you plan your unified communications implementation.

Planning

This section provides a practical, vendor-independent service to any Enterprise that is seeking the benefits of Unified Communications. How do you pull everything together to implement unified communications? Use the tools in this sequence to define unified communications for your business.

Contact

UCStrategies is an industry resource for unified communications enterprises, communications vendors, system integrators, and anyone interested in the growing unified communications arena.

A supplier of objective information on unified communications, UCStrategies is supported by an alliance of leading communication industry advisors, analysts, and consultants who have worked in the various segments of unified communications since its inception.

Multi-Organizational UC

As a rule, UC systems are best shared with others. Typically, UC systems support multiple users within a single organization. UC solutions may provide a personal experience, but are inherently shared infrastructure. Taking it to the next level is sharing the system among multiple organizations. This concept is rapidly becoming more prevalent with the boom of service providers that offer services to multiple organizations.

From an evolutionary perspective, the PBX wasn’t commonly shared. Typically, a single organization purchased their own system and connected to it to desired services such as operator consoles, call recording and call accounting systems, music-on-hold sources, etc. Because the programming of these systems were very detailed, there were various approaches to creating virtual splices with trunk groups or service classes, but such attempts were both complex and restrictive.

There are two modern approaches to sharing systems across organizations: multi-tenant and multi-instance. These two approaches should not be confused.

Multi-tenant may or may not include server virtualization. It means the system itself is inherently designed to accommodate multiple organizations, and effectively means the core system can be sliced into virtually separate systems. Each tenant can have the same or different dial plans, each IVR is totally unique even with the same options. Multi-tenant systems were initially designed for landlords that wanted a single solution for an entire facility.

Multi-instance systems are directly related to server virtualization. In this case, the system software can be run multiple times on separate virtual instances. Each tenant effectively receives their own dedicated instance. There is no risk of accidental cross communication or conflicts as each virtual server only knows about the others as separate systems – perhaps connected via TIE lines.

A multi-tenant system can be run in multiple instances – we will call that a multi-multi tenant instance system – that’s for the advanced class.

Multi-instance implementations are more common because most UC solutions were designed for single tenant implementations. A traditional premises-based solution that can be virtualized with minor modifications can be made suitable for service provider implementations. The primary benefit of this model is that single tenant systems are inherently simpler to manage and there’s more choice. The downside is they require larger implementations to justify dedicated virtual overhead. Also, during upgrades, each system needs to be upgraded separately which can create a significant amount of work.

These issues don’t just apply to core platforms, but to applications as well. For example, multi-tenant advanced call center features or analytics engines could be less expensive to SMB users when shared among multiple organizations. Providers that promote “big company features” to small businesses probably utilize multi-tenant systems.

Multi-tenant systems offer more scalability. Both approaches can scale to large implementations, but multi tenant systems accommodate small business users as well. Another advantage of multi-instance systems is that a single upgrade will upgrade all hosted tenants. However, it can also be problematic if some customers don’t want to upgrade. Also, multi-tenant systems require more consideration regarding disaster recovery as a single failure could take down several organizations.

If it is done right, these distinctions should be invisible to end users. It’s a far bigger issue for the provider. This is quite simply why some providers target larger accounts only, and why some are quite comfortable with small customer implementations. End users should be aware of the technology in use.

I guess you don't remember when we developed "re-entrant" programs that let different users share common application code with different data contexts in the original interactive "time-sharing" systems. "Back to the future!"

RSS Feeds

Unified Communications

Communications Integrated to Optimize Business Processes.
UC integrates real-time and non-real time communications with business processes and requirements.
Uses presence capabilities for coordination, and presents a consistent unified user interface and experience across multiple devices and media types.